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| Greg's diary |
| May 2024 |
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| Wednesday, 1 May 2024 | Dereel | Images for 1 May 2024 |
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NBN outage!
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Early this morning, while I was reading news on hirse, my mobile phone, an app failed to resolve a host name. Bloody Android apps! It wasn't until later that I discovered that that was the beginning of a 30 minute network outage.
OK, what's my MyAussie app for? Fired it up and discovered that it wanted a password. My passwords don't cater for mobile phones: this one was 31 characters long, sprinkled with special characters that are a particular pain to enter on a mobile phone (is that why so many password restrictors demand them?), and Aussie is too secure to display more than one character at a time when you enter a password. The result:
Or was it? They don't seem to know. But when I tried again later, it had decided:
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By the time I had finished messing around, the network came back, after less than 33 minutes. I give in: clearly Aussie wants me to use a less secure password, so I created one that it still accepted and tried to log in:
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Sigh. Try again:
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I thought the option of saving a password to Google (Why? To reduce its security?) was a good touch. But finally I managed to log in, and was rewarded by the option of using the fingerprint sensor to log me in, which makes things much more bearable. And then I checked: no outages recorded.
Oh, you want NBN outages? Sure, we have plenty on offer:
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Nine days of outages! Hopefully this is their typical inaccuracy.
In passing, how secure are fingerprint sensors? Probably secure enough for the purposes that the app fulfils, but wouldn't it be possible to capture an image of my fingerprint and use that instead? Yes! It happened to Ursula von der Leyen ten years ago. Are things safer now?
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Beijing Hokkien Mee?
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
One of the more interesting culinary discoveries that I've made in the last few years is KL Hokkien Mee. And now I discover that there's something related in Beijing: Beijing Fried Sauce Noodles (Zha Jiang Mian, 炸酱面). There seem to be countless variations, but they all use a dark sauce, rendered fat pork belly and crunchy skin. One to try.
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Mona progress
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Bruno and Mona are still not lying in a basket together, but they're coming closer:
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That's either side of the TV.
Bruno is also getting more confident. He knows that he's not allowed on the dining table, but that doesn't stop him:
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Even after I sprayed him with water, he dried himself and got back up there again.
In passing, I weighed them today. Mona didn't eat for the first day she was here, and a day or two later she only weighed 3.2 kg. Bruno is a particularly heavy cat, presumably US standard, where they write
The overall impression of the ideal Burmese would be a cat of medium size with substantial bone structure, good muscular development and a surprising weight for its size
He weighs round 5 kg. Today, though, Mona weighed 3.6 kg and Bruno 4.9. That's less difference than I expected.
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Academia nonsense of the day
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
After being asked if I wrote “Treasurer” and co-authored a paper with PO Box, today I got another one:
21 N 01-05-2024 To groggyhimsel ( 901) Mentioned by rm rf N “Greg Lehey” cited by “rm rf”
Is this Artificial Intelligence at its finest?
| Thursday, 2 May 2024 | Dereel | Images for 2 May 2024 |
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First success of student protests
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
Looking briefly through the news this morning, saw the headline Colombia breaks ties with Israel. Who would have thought that the student protests would have had such a success in such a short time? And particularly Columbia, who didn't seem to be listening very carefully.
Oh. I wasn't reading very carefully. Colombia, the country, not Columbia, the university. Still, it sets a signal. Now if the USA would finally stop supporting this genocide!
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Anti-Semitism: a non-word?
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Topic: language, opinion | Link here |
More and more, the Israeli government has been accusing their detractors of anti-Semitism. That's nothing new: there's a line of thought amongst many Jews that says “You disagree with me? I'm a Jew! You're antisemitic!”.
That's nonsense, of course, and Bernie Sanders recently clarified the distinction between disliking somebody because of his Jewish race or culture (a special case of racism) and disliking somebody because of his actions.
But what's special about anti-Semitism? It's just a special case of racism. Yes, 80 years ago many Jews were subject to horrible treatment at the hands of Hitler's régime, not unlike but even worse than what the Israelis are doing in Gaza now. But now people ignore that background, now that the Israelis are the aggressors and not the victims. They should be ashamed of themselves.
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No more cheque books
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Carefully proof-read mail from ANZ today, telling of changes to their handling of accounts. No more cheque books! Once that was the primary access to a bank account. And “Access Advantage” accounts, whatever they may be, don't earn interest for balances over $50,000, as shown in a table indicating interest rates of 0.01% to 0.02% on amounts over $50,000. Yes, that's barely interest, only $20 a year for a balance of $100,000, but my guess is that they didn't read their statement carefully.
But no cheque books? An end of an era. Now everything is electronic.
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Cracking the fvwm2 to fvwm3 transition
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I've been dragging my feet on updating hydra's window manager, mainly because I don't know where to start. I wrote the configuration files nearly 30 years ago, and I have long forgotten the details, in particular what I changed relative to the defaults: this was before I religiously ran version control.
One of the big issues, though, was that fvwm3 no longer issues error messages! So I don't know what it doesn't like. After RTFM I discovered that I can get it to output messages to a log file, apparently with a predetermined name ~/.fvwm/fvwm3-output.log. That's particularly irritating in my situation, where I don't have a directory ~/.fvwm. I have a common directory with those contents, but then every window manager would overwrite the same file.
Still, let's try. Firstly, it didn't like the -s option (run on a single screen). Why? How do I specify a single screen? Left it out, and it seemed to only run on the specified screen. Does it now parse the display name maybe?
The log output was interesting.
[1714624576.085241] scan_screens: Case 1: Add new monitors
[1714624576.085273] monitor_mark_new: Added new monitor: DP-3 (0x8321c8180)
[1714624576.086994] main: Loading window states via (null)
That suggests that it didn't even try other screens. Then lots of complaints about style options using colours, as was to be expected, also missing fonts (another issue I need to look at). But then:
[1714624576.108044] CMD_Read: file 'xterms-hydra:0.3' not found in /home/grog/.fvwm or /usr/local/share/fvwm3
The invocation line was
fvwm3 -v -d hydra:0.3 -f /home/local/X/.fvwm/fvwm2rc-hydra:0.3
So it hasn't ignored the path name for the configuration file. It has just discarded the path and put in its own directory! That's definitely a violation of POLA, and arguably a bug. In the meantime I found a way to output the error messages to stdout, so I could put in a symlink:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/10) ~ 153 -> ls -l .fvwm
lrwxr-xr-x 1 grog lemis 19 2 May 15:23 .fvwm -> /home/local/X/.fvwm
And with that it ran, modulo colours. And try as I might, I couldn't find instructions on how to convert old-style colour definitions to what fvwm3 wants. Still, it works for the time being. The current invocation is:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/10) ~ 155 -> fvwm3 -v -o - -display hydra:0.3 -f /home/local/X/.fvwm/fvwm2rc-hydra:0.3 &
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www: no swap!
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
A few months back I ran into memory pressure on www.lemis.com, my remote virtual server. OK, add a “memory disk”. And that worked.
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/swapfile bs=1m count=4096
# mdconfig -a -t vnode -f /var/swapfile
md0
# swapon /dev/md0
Until Vultr decided to reboot my machine. And then the md device was gone. It wasn't until today that I noticed. How do you ensure that they're recreated after reboot?
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Web site attack
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Sometime in the early evening it occurred to me that I hadn't received any external mail in over an hour. Problems on the external server?
Yes. The file system was full. This morning there were something like 13 GB free, but now it was at 108% with -3.5 GB. Something had eaten up over 16 GB in a few hours.
I knew where to look. The web server error log was full with messages like
[Thu May 02 07:42:26.457757 2024] [php7:notice] [pid 27107] [client 145.239.202.7:64277] PHP Notice: Undefined index: -1 OR 2+948-948-1=0+0+0+1 in /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/kleins-road/exterior-slides.php on line 399, referer: http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-jun2013.php?subtitle=Al%20Jazeera%20issues&article=D-20130604-000628
[Thu May 02 07:42:26.457785 2024] [php7:notice] [pid 27107] [client 145.239.202.7:64277] PHP Notice: Undefined index: -1 OR 2+948-948-1=0+0+0+1 in /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/kleins-road/exterior-slides.php on line 399, referer: http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-jun2013.php?subtitle=Al%20Jazeera%20issues&article=D-20130604-000628
[Thu May 02 07:42:26.457812 2024] [php7:notice] [pid 27107] [client 145.239.202.7:64277] PHP Notice: Undefined index: -1 OR 2+948-948-1=0+0+0+1 in /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/kleins-road/exterior-slides.php on line 399, referer: http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-jun2013.php?subtitle=Al%20Jazeera%20issues&article=D-20130604-000628
What's that? At the very least, an error in my PHP code. But look at the time stamps! There were 55 μs between the three! OK, these views aren't that important. Remove the script.
That didn't help, of course. It was just a coincidence that I found these error messages. I tried a number of things, but it kept on coming. What was it trying to do? I kept some log messages for later analysis, but I couldn't find anything that made any sense.
ip7.ip-145-239-202.eu - - [02/May/2024:07:55:42 +0000] "GET /grog/diary.php?dirdate=20071110&image=dam-nw.jpeg&imagesizes=-1%20OR%203%2B45-45-1=0%2B0%2B0%2B1 HTTP/1.1" 200 45879 "http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-jun2013.php?subtitle=Al%20Jazeera%20issues&article=D-20130604-000628" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/121.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
ip7.ip-145-239-202.eu - - [02/May/2024:07:55:41 +0000] "GET /grog/diary-jan2009.php?dirdate=20090101&image=nest-demolition-1.jpeg&imagesizes=bs&view= HTTP/1.1" 200 444161 "http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-jun2013.php?subtitle=Al%20Jazeera%20issues&article=D-20130604-000628" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/121.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
ip7.ip-145-239-202.eu - - [02/May/2024:07:55:41 +0000] "GET /grog/diary-jan2009.php?dirdate=20090101&image=nest-demolition-1.jpeg&imagesizes=bs&view=http://dicrpdbjmemujemfyopp.zzz/yrphmgdpgulaszriylqiipemefmacafkxycjaxjs%3F.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 444161 "http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-jun2013.php?subtitle=Al%20Jazeera%20issues&article=D-20130604-000628" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/121.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
ip7.ip-145-239-202.eu - - [02/May/2024:07:55:43 +0000] "GET /grog/diary.php?dirdate=20071110&image=dam-nw.jpeg&imagesizes=-1%20OR%203*2<(0%2B5%2B45-45) HTTP/1.1" 200 45859 "http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-jun2013.php?subtitle=Al%20Jazeera%20issues&article=D-20130604-000628" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/121.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
By evening it had filled the log file again. I need to find an automatic way to block this kind of aggression. In the meantime, a regular check of log file size and rollover would be a good idea.
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Android strangeness
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Downloading some files from hirse, my mobile phone, was particularly slow today. Why?
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/15) ~ 4 -> ping hirse
PING hirse.lemis.com (192.109.197.228): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=4432.006 ms
64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=4491.037 ms
64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=4636.822 ms
64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=4777.693 ms
64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=4885.086 ms
64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=5 ttl=64 time=3869.501 ms
64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=6 ttl=64 time=2954.141 ms
64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=7 ttl=64 time=1959.271 ms
64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=8 ttl=64 time=967.665 ms
64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=9 ttl=64 time=4.943 ms
64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=10 ttl=64 time=1.908 ms
64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=11 ttl=64 time=1.314 ms
64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=12 ttl=64 time=2.119 ms
It came good by itself. What causes this kind of issue? Android?
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Mona's progress
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Mona continues to settle in—slowly. In this failed photo (Bruno moved away at the wrong moment) she approaches him, and she has done this a couple of times.
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She also no longer tries to run away when the dogs go past at a distance.
| Friday, 3 May 2024 | Dereel | Images for 3 May 2024 |
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Death of an elephant
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Topic: general, animals, gardening | Link here |
Winter's coming, time to bring the curry tree indoors. First move a table (glass mounted on an elephant statue). I lifted the glass, Petra was to take the elephant. But they were stuck together.
For a while, until I had lifted it high enough. Then they parted ways:
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Yvonne is not amused.
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Web site overload: recovery
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Once again this morning the web server error log was full of error messages from ip7.ip-145-239-202.eu. But finally it seems to be over. All that remains is this strange error message
[Thu May 02 07:42:26.457757 2024] [php7:notice] [pid 27107] [client 145.239.202.7:64277] PHP Notice: Undefined index: -1 OR 2+948-948-1=0+0+0+1 in /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/kleins-road/exterior-slides.php on line 399, referer: http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-jun2013.php?subtitle=Al%20Jazeera%20issues&article=D-20130604-000628
OK, I've blown away that file, but I have a local copy. Works perfectly. Copy it back to www. No photos found! Potentially that was the reason for the negative index.
But why? This worked before—didn't it? Did I make a local patch on www, and then throw it out yesterday? What do my RCS logs say?
revision 1.488
date: 2015/05/23 22:59:49; author: grog; state: Exp; lines: +20 -15
Obsolete.
Oh. The date is significant: it's two weeks after we moved into Stones Road, at which point the Kleins Road photos stopped being updated. But that doesn't make them obsolete.
More to the point, though, I moved the photos off-site, and that required a considerable restructure of many pages. And sure enough, for the corresponding page for Stones Road I had:
revision 1.185
date: 2018/09/05 03:02:26; author: grog; state: Exp; lines: +27 -13
Check for existence of image in photolist.php, not by looking for the
image, which could be anywhere in the Internet.
It seems that I never got round to applying that to the Kleins Road. The two pages are almost identical, and I was able to copy the relevant parts from one script to another, after which it worked.
But only that part. Click on the detail links (for example http://www.lemis.com/grog/kleins-road/exterior-view.php?view=verandah-centre), and you get an empty display. That, too, needs fixing. Mañana.
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Indirect cat injuries
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Topic: health, animals, opinion | Link here |
Just before going to bed, Yvonne let the dogs in. At the door, heard her curse. Cat run out? Called to her, but got no answer. Found a torch (where did I put these things?) and out. Yes, Bruno had seized the opportunity and went out into the dark. After a couple of minutes found him in the hayshed. But where was Yvonne? Somewhere out near the compost heap, where she managed to trip over something in the almost complete darkness. A couple of cuts on her hand and this beauty of a lump on her knee:
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The moral of the story: keep better, brighter torches, and call for help if Bruno escapes.
| Saturday, 4 May 2024 | Dereel | Images for 4 May 2024 |
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The night when time stood still
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Woke up at 5:15 this morning. What's that light outside? It was almost as bright as day. But the sun doesn't rise for another 2 hours. Turned around, went back to sleep and woke at 7:15, but couldn't get back to sleep. OK, get up. Looked at my watch. 8:42! My bedside clock was fully 1 hour, 37 minutes slow!
How could that happen? The clock is electronic and synchronizes to mains frequency (which is somewhat fast). It doesn't seem likely that it would fail like that. And then I asked Yvonne. Yes, her clock stopped altogether round 1:15. She looked back quite some time later and it was showing the same time, so she reset it.
So whatever it was, it wasn't my bedside clock, and it seems to have started round 1:00. When I got into the office, I found that tiwi had restarted at 1:28:
May 4 01:05:13 tiwi wh1080[11827]: Rain: 2173.5000003.1
May 4 01:28:01 tiwi syslogd: kernel boot file is /boot/kernel/kernel
May 4 01:28:01 tiwi kernel: ---<<BOOT>>---
May 4 01:28:01 tiwi kernel: Copyright (c) 1992-2021 The FreeBSD Project.
But that was only 23 minutes after the last log message. And no other machines were affected, nor were the clocks in the kitchen. There was also nothing obvious in the PV inverter logs, though they do show a drop in power consumption. I'll need to think more about this.
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More ldconfig strangeness
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Rebooting tiwi meant that my weather program didn't get restarted. Once again I had this issue with libmysql.so.18. I suspected that that was due to the fact that the directory usr/local/lib/mysql was a symlink to the directory on eureka. OK, copy the files over and run ldconfig on them.
It still didn't work! I was in the parent directory, so I simply wrote ldconfig -m mysql. And it seems that it doesn't like that. ldconfig -m /usr/local/lib/mysql/ did the trick. And hopefully now that the libraries are local, I won't run into that problem again.
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Ramen for breakfast?
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Topic: food and drink, technology, opinion | Link here |
I've been thinking of various ways to eat Ramen noodles for breakfast. One of the more interesting facts is that they really come from China, and the kind I have come from Shandong. I've played around a couple of times, but how about asking an artificially intelligent expert?
To my surprise, Google Gemini came up with a recipe that doesn't look bad. The interesting idea was to fry the noodles until crisp. That didn't work for me, and in general the experiment wasn't very successful. In particular, I didn't know that the Miso was salty, so the overall dish was just barely edible.
In passing, savour this statement:
You can adjust the amount of miso paste in the sauce to your preference. For a stronger miso flavor, add more miso paste.
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Mona progress
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Mona is gradually settling in well. In particular, she's coming to terms with Bruno. This evening they both sat on my lap:
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There's still a gap between the two of them, but that, too, will pass.
| Sunday, 5 May 2024 | Dereel | Images for 5 May 2024 |
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More Hugin strangenesses
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
It was house photo day yesterday. And once again I had issues with the newer version of Hugin that I have on hydra (2023.0.0.d88dc56ded0e) while the older version on eureka (2018.0.0) worked fine.
I use a script that creates the project files (.pto) and then stitches them. Yesterday's panoramas had a number of problems, the most extreme of which was this one (first 2023 Hugin, then 2018 (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
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What causes that? The project file is the same in each case, and so is the invocation to build the panorama, in essence
hugin_executor --stitching laundry-door.pto
Could it have something to do with masks? The black area at top left was masked out in one of the component images, but as the second image shows, there was enough information to cover the area, and the greyed-out area to the right of centre is hard to understand.
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More weather station pain
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Topic: technology, general | Link here |
Writing yesterday's article on my weather program, I checked the current status. Nothing! It seems that it had stopped logging at 17:30 or so yesterday afternoon.
Checking came up with a continual stream of
May 5 07:00:03 tiwi wh1080[111]: Can't read device: Input/output error or Unknown error (5)
May 5 07:00:03 tiwi wh1080[110]: Can't read device: Device busy or Unknown error (16)
May 5 07:00:06 tiwi wh1080[116]: Can't read device: Device busy or Unknown error (16)
May 5 07:00:06 tiwi wh1080[115]: Can't read device: Input/output error or Unknown error (5)
May 5 07:00:08 tiwi wh1080[119]: Can't read device: Input/output error or Unknown error (5)
What went wrong there? Disconnected and reconnected the USB connection. No change. Power cycled (remove/replace batteries) the internal unit. No change, and it almost immediately communicated with the external unit.
Much searching. Why are there two copies running? I don't recall an execve() in the code. Even more searching showed that I had two copies of the wrapper script running, both started round the same time, and the two processes were fighting each other. How did that happen? Stopping one of them was enough for the other to communicate properly with the device.
Should I put in some kind of lock? No, I don't think so. If I expend any more time on this thing, it should be to adapt to a saner and more reliable device.
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Mona and Bruno
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
Mona and Bruno continue to come closer—too close, maybe. This afternoon I heard a lot of cat growling, and into the lounge room to find Bruno on top of Mona, holding her down by biting her neck—the position that studs use when mating with queens. That's nonsense, of course, since they're both desexed, but where did he get the idea from? Is it something sexual, or just an instinct?
Things got better, and in the evening they were once again together on our laps:
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But it wasn't all that peaceful:
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Is Bruno jealous, maybe? It's unlikely, but not beyond the bounds of possibility.
| Monday, 6 May 2024 | Dereel | Images for 6 May 2024 |
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Jack Hua noodles revisited
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I've been using Jack Hua noodles for some time, and lately it has become clear that they tend to disintegrate after serving. Cooked too long? Well, they don't want them cooked at all, just soaked in hot water from 5 to 8 minutes.
Today I tried that, for 7 minutes. The result was not encouraging:
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So I should try for much shorter softening.
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Better language?
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Topic: language, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Sixteen years ago I started grumbling about bad language in cooking. In particular, Woolworths renamed many vegetables, the worst being spring onions, which they alternately called shallots (a different vegetable) or “Eschallot”, But today I find that they have seen the light. Here 16 years ago and now:
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To make up for it, they have found a way to obfuscate their own name.
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Rearranging the office
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
I've been in my current office for nearly 9 years, and in that time a lot has not changed. I still have the same computer and some of the monitors, and the computers under the monitors have also not all changed. Here the only photo I took 9 years ago, and how things look now:
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But I put a couple of audio amplifiers under the leftmost and rightmost monitors. The leftmost was my old Technics SU-3500, but it failed relatively soon after, so I replaced it with a Sansui San110, which ended up under the right-hand monitor.
But that, too, wasn't overly reliable. It works, at least on the right channel, but it irritated me, so I replaced it with a small modern device in September 2020. Both big amplifiers stayed there because they were still holding up monitors.
But now “fognozzle” on Freecycle was looking for old amplifiers, condition not important. OK, he can have both. All I need to do is disentangle them and replace them with a couple of old ThinkCentres (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
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Straightforward enough, bar the cabling and the accumulated dirt:
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And so it took me half an hour. At least I didn't dislodge anything.
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Mona progress
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Mona continues to make slow progress. It's rather concerning that Bruno is so aggressive towards her. I think it's really that he doesn't know any better, and Mona handles it well.
This evening she was on my lap when Elena came up to me and wouldn't be discouraged. Mona not amused, didn't want to stay on my lap. So I put her on the floor, where she hissed at Lena and chased her away. That's probably a good lesson for both of them.
| Tuesday, 7 May 2024 | Dereel | Images for 7 May 2024 |
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More network outages
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Another network outage round 9:00 this morning, like last week. There was a difference, though: the display on the NTD was different, no signal strength indication at all. Clearly one of the blanket National Broadband Network outages that they're threatening all the time.
OK, now that I can access the MyAussie app without too much pain, let's see what they have to say.
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Yes, of course we don't have an NBN connection, which is why I enabled mobile data. But even if I hadn't, “something went wrong” is a cop-out. And despite everything, I wasn't able to access the site:
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Report a fault? How? The selection is under the error message here, but there's no way to select a service. In other words, much worse even than I had feared.
The net came back, then went away again. Are we to endure this for several more days?
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You must utterly destroy them
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Topic: history, politics, opinion | Link here |
The Israeli destruction of the Gaza Strip haunts me. How can civilized people behave like that? One reason, of course, is because the Bible tells them to, in Deuteronomy 7. And yes, that passage refers to the arrival of the Jews in the Promised Land and how they should treat the existing inhabitants—exactly the situation in which present-day Israelis find themselves.
Why don't people comment on this? Of course they do. Decades ago David Steinberg (a Jew) wrote an article titled Commandment for Genocide?. Why have the mainstream media not taken issue with this part of the Bible?
More to the point, when will the USA stop supporting this horror? Instead they condemn the anti-Semitism that the Israeli government has inspired in people who can't distinguish between governments and people.
| Wednesday, 8 May 2024 | Dereel | Images for 8 May 2024 |
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Another bloody RCD trip!
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
While making breakfast this morning, the RCD for the kitchen tripped. That's the same one that has given me pain last month. And on that occasion, too, it happened while cooking breakfast. I had suspected the water kettle then, but there was no obvious connection today. Still, since it also took tiwi down, it might be time to replace the kettle.
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libmysqlclient: still no joy
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
The power outage also meant that I had to manually restart the weather monitor on tiwi. As last month, I had to run ldconfig to get the system to recognize it. So it wasn't the symlink. Presumably the issue was that MySQL wasn't installed on tiwi, and the hints file doesn't include the directory. Time to RTFM and check which hints file I should update.
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More net outages
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Topic: history, technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Another two National Broadband Network outages this morning. Clearly we can expect more:
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And reading back in my diary for years gone by, that's nothing unusual. Five years ago today I had exactly the same problem.
| Thursday, 9 May 2024 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 9 May 2024 |
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Death of ceramics
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Over 5 years ago we bought some ceramic knives and found them excellent—for about 15 months. Then they had started to go blunt, and there's no way to sharpen them. So I'm back to using steel knives, though Yvonne still uses the ceramics. A good idea, but they don't last.
And then four years ago we bought the first of a number of non-stick ceramic frying pans, with which I was really happy. Here an omelette fried with no fat:
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Alas, like the knives, they don't last. Today I made some nasi goreng in another of the pans, a newer one. At the end it looked like this:
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The food stuck so firmly that I couldn't even scrape the remains from the pan. Even after washing it and putting it through the dishwasher, it wasn't clean:
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Why is that? Could it be that they're too temperature-sensitive?
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More blood tests
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
Into town this afternoon for my six-monthly blood test. I was asked to fill out a form asking if I had any incidence of prostate cancer (no), or whether a father, brother or son had had it (yes, my father), and acknowledging that I could be up for a bill of $110 otherwise. Clearly it doesn't apply to me, but I got a copy of the form I signed just in case.
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Dan Murphy: no drinks
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Then to Dan Murphy to look for some Aqvavit. They hadn't even heard of it! I'm sure that they once had it, but like Kirsch, it's no longer available, and neither the assistant with whom I spoke nor his iPad knew what it was.
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Oodles of noodles
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
On to the Fruit Shack to look for ingredients for the Beijing Fried Sauce Noodles (Zha Jiang Mian, 炸酱面) recipe that I found at the beginning of the month. Very difficult. There are at least 4 ingredients that I don't know:
Dry yellow soybean paste (干黄酱). They admit that it's unlikely to be found outside China, and the recipe works around that.
Fermented yellow soybean paste (黄豆酱) or ground bean sauce.
Sweet bean paste (甜面酱).
The noodles. The recipe is a bit vague too, but it shows these noodles as an example:
What did I find? A clear indication that I need to understand Chinese better. The only item that I was able to identify definitively was this “sweet bean paste”, which, as advertised, contains no beans:
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Then there was this:
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Clearly it's not the fermented yellow soybean paste (黄豆酱). But is it related? It wasn't until I got home that I was able to follow the translation (Doubanjiang) to discover that it contains significant quantities of chili, not what I need here.
But then I found this:
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Clearly it's Korean. The recipe mentions that something similar is eaten in Korea. But once again further research at home indicates that it's for seafood, as the right of the image shows.
And then the noodles. Almost nothing similar, though these Shanxi planed noodles may be suitable:
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I've had them before, but after a disastrous experience with something similar, I stopped eating them.
So: what do I do? Research other recipes and experiment. That should keep me busy.
| Friday, 10 May 2024 | Dereel | Images for 10 May 2024 |
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Goodbye amplifiers
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Alan Mallows, known on Freecycle as fognozzle, along today to pick up the amplifiers that I had extracted for him. I had thought that I knew him, but that was somebody else. An interesting person, currently planning to devote his time to the study of counterpoint. Clearly he has more energy than I. He gave me some interesting leads, notable the Ballarat Repair Cafe and FlashDrive. The latter may be able to do something with Bruce Evans' mutilated computers.
| Saturday, 11 May 2024 | Dereel | Images for 11 May 2024 |
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Hugin problems, continued
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Last week I reported the problems I had with the new version of Hugin and got a response from Lukas Wirz, who is working on enblend and has recently committed a patch to fix this kind of problem. So I downloaded the latest version of enblend 4.3 from https://sourceforge.net/p/enblend/code/ci/default/tree/, a link that I had to be told about: the home page only offered version 4.2, which is what I had been running. Building had also not been straightforward: the FreeBSD Ports Collection has a too-rigid structure to easily deal with changes of location and archive format, and the README in the archive is seriously in need of correction. But finally I had it compiled, version 4.3-e87da60fab22.
House photo day today, a good day to compare the stitching. Here 4.1.4 (from eureka), 4.2 as released and in the Ports Collection, and my new version 4.3-e87da60fab22 (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
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So yes, the latest version is an improvement over 4.2, but not good, and not as good as 4.1.4. Did some more playing around and discovered that it's related to extraneous objects in the component images, notably the panorama bracket and the legs of the tripod, as this component image shows:
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But it's strange how it deals with it. The artefacts don't match the bracket. My guess is that it relates to the image overlaps.
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Sourdough: end of an era?
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Time to bake bread again today. But somehow my starters are not looking good. Here one of only two months ago:
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There's something on the surface that resembles little worms. I've seen that before years ago :
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This was with a starter that I bought on eBay 6½ years ago, and the sample in question is about the 45th generation. Time for another one? Or should I consider what I wrote in 2010?
So possibly the form just indicated lack of moisture.
No, I don't think so. But maybe the relatively consistent hydration of the starter makes it easier for other organisms to attack it. Currently I'm using a ratio of 5:4 water to flour, in itself up from 1:1. How about 2:1? Tried that today, with the interesting effect that the mixture immediately produced bubbles:
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But maybe it's time to buy a new starter.
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Focus problems
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
How do you take a photo of a surface with almost no distinguishing marks? Today I found one possibility: you don't. Taking the photo of the infected sourdough starter was easy enough, but I wasn't able to focus on the surface of the uninfected one. The best I got was this:
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And that doesn't bear closer scrutiny:
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There was nothing for the autofocus to focus on, and I couldn't get enough contrast to use focus peaking. I suppose this is the way it always was decades ago, and the reason why so few macro photos were usable.
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The coming of spring
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Seen while walking the dogs today:
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That's a spring flower. And autumn is by no means over yet!
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Mona's progress
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Topic: animals | Link here |
We've had Mona for 3 weeks now, and she continues to settle in:
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Bruno is becoming less aggressive, and they seem to be coming together. I have the impression that Mona wants to play too, but she's waiting for him to become gentler. And she's also not as terrified of the dogs any more, though there's still a way to go on that topic.
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Southern lights?
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Topic: general | Link here |
The current solar weather has given rise to particularly bright Aurora australis and Aurora borealis round much of the world, and they were visible from here—I was told. I went out round 22:00 to take a look, and there was nothing but cloud. Potentially it would improve, but after my experience with the Lunar eclipse 1½ years ago I couldn't be bothered. And despite some searches I couldn't find any photos on line from round here.
| Sunday, 12 May 2024 | Dereel | Images for 12 May 2024 |
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Bread surprise
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
The sourdough starter that I started yesterday developed much as I had expected, and of course it was much thinner, making it easier to handle. Baked a loaf with it, as planned. The old method had 375 ml of water in the starter, minus 80 g removed for the next starter, and 760 g in the last stage, for a total of 1055 g. The new starter had 600 g of water, minus 128 g removed for the next starter, so I needed an additional 535 g to make my 1055 g. The result was a dough with exactly the same consistency as before.
But it rose so much more quickly and more vigorously:
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I hadn't expected that. Of course, it collapsed a little on baking:
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Still, an unexpected change.
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More Hugin experiments
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Yesterday's comparisons of the output of enblend 4.1.4, 4.2 and 4.3 were revealing, but they don't match the images I used last week. Followed that one up, and got (again, versions 4.1.4, 4.2 and 4.3) (once again, run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
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This time the image from 4.3 was almost acceptable, but compared to 4.1.4 it still has serious issues, in particular gradation and a black triangle to the left of the tripod shadow.
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ACDSee software free
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Topic: technology, photography, opinion | Link here |
Interesting offer in the mail today: “Completely FREE! Get Gemstone Photo Editor now, no strings!”.
OK, if it's free, I'll take 2. I looked at ACDSee briefly ten years ago, and while I didn't find anything wrong with it, I didn't mention it again.
OK, follow the link. “Please fill out this CAPTCHA”. Dammit, what is wrong with the browser on hydra:0.2 that always wants CAPTCHAs to be filled out? Started up despise, where it's supposed to go, and got the same result. Then a download link, along with a popup asking whether I wanted to do something that I could resist. No download!
Try again. “Our records show that you have already downloaded this software”. Dammit, is this just an attempt to annoy me? Sent a message to their help line and moved on.
Oh. The “Submit” button appears to have been a request to send me an email message. It didn't say anything, but I got the email message with a link to download it. Did that, installed the package, and I was asked for a license key! OK, I get a 30 day trial, and in that time they should have sorted things out.
But how do I access my files? Again one of these stupid toy file access windows which didn't show my P: file system. It found old files there, but it took me a long time to discover that the window was too small to show the file system. Ugh. But by that time I had moved on to less frustrating things.
Only later did I notice that the email included a license key to type in. Did that, and it worked. So maybe I am just being too easily frustrated.
And what is Gemstone Photo Editor 12? I thought that it was not the latest version, but that seems not to be the case: it's a component of their total package. It might be worth trying out.
| Monday, 13 May 2024 | Dereel | |
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Latest AAMI nonsense
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Yet another email from AAMI today, technically in response to my message of 29 April. They enclose a purported assessor's report that is interesting for a number of reasons. In particular, it doesn't describe any damage! I think that it's time to read “Brave New World” again. I recall something about Epsilons that might be relevant today.
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Understanding ACDSee
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Topic: photography | Link here |
What does ACDSee Gemstone Photo Editor 12 do? What can I do with it? There are plenty of videos, of course, and today I took a look at some.
I still don't know what it can do. The ones I looked at show navigating their menu system and some of the normal things, like changing gradation. But they start in the middle! Yes, I have established that I can start the thing and load (“import)” photos. And apart from the basics, what can I do with them? Remove background seems to be standard now. Can I use it to get better results with my kangaroo photos, or maybe the Christmas photo last year? Hard to say. It will require still more playing around to find out. The good news is that the license is permanent, so I'm in no hurry.
| Tuesday, 14 May 2024 | Dereel | |
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Breasts with sculpture
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Topic: animals, general | Link here |
Larissa has joint pains again, and today Yvonne took her to Pene Kirk for an injection. On the way home, in the middle of nowhere between Rokewood Junction and Cape Clear, she found various things to give away on the side of the road. She brought back this wooden sculpture, about 35 cm high:
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It seems to emphasize the breasts and nipples; everything else is much less detailed.
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Mona and Bruno: still not there
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Topic: animals, opinion | Link here |
Somehow it's taking longer than I would like for Bruno and Mona to adapt to each other. Bruno keeps chasing her and jumping on her. I can't make up my mind whether he just wants to play with her, or whether he resents her, but I wish it would be over.
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Power outage!
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
While watching the news on TV this afternoon, there was a “beep” and the TV and tiwi, the driving computer, powered off. Nothing else, including the microwave ovens and lagoon, Yvonne's computer, which were on the same circuit, didn't. It must have been a power surge, lasting less than a second.
Damn! I must do something about that. Waited for it to come back. It didn't. And of course the display remained blank. I really need to do something about that; the TV is connected by HDMI, but the machine comes up looking for the DVI interface, which wasn't connected.
Into the office to get a monitor to connect to the DVI cable which I had hanging out for exactly this purpose. But the display remained dark. Was it trying to talk to the on-board output? Took out the machine and took it into the office, where I discovered that hydra had also reset. Damn! But first things first. Connect it to a DVI display and discover that it's waiting to mount a file system on hydra. And hydra is waiting to mount a file system on tiwi. Typical deadlock. Fix that, but while I have it there, let's fix the display issues. Yes, I could set the display to the display card, but there was no way to tell it which output to use. Connect up an HDMI link to test that. How I hate HDMI! Somehow the connectors are designed to only fit if they're exactly lined up! How I hate the fact that every monitor has different connections, usually pointing down to make it more difficult to insert. It took me 5 minutes just to insert the connector. And then I discovered that it was the wrong one!
Finally I got it in and confirmed that it worked. Nearly an hour! High time that we finally get some surge protection in place. And a lesson not to cross-mount at boot. I can do that later.
And the default display? It seems to be related to this particular machine, a ThinkCentre M91p with 6 GB memory. It's somewhat underpowered, and it replaces teevee, which was an M93p with 8 GB, and I can expand that to 16 GB or more if necessary. And it doesn't have these display issues that the M91p does. So my plan is to migrate back to that sometime. It looks like this “sometime” should be soon.
But why no display on the monitor when I first tried it? My guess is that it had tried the DVI output, found nothing and given up altogether on a display, rather than checking what else was there. If I had power cycled it, there's a good chance that it would have worked.
And hydra? Up and running, but of course the X configuration is all over the place. I need to look at that again.
| Wednesday, 15 May 2024 | Dereel | Images for 15 May 2024 |
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Hard-to-clean kitchen utensils
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
A while back we bought a large cover for frying pans. It covers various pan sizes with a silicone ring. Sounds like a good idea, but recently we somehow got dirt in the silicone. And I can't get it out! After twice through the dish washer (intensive programme), soaking and scratching, it still looks like this:
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Why is that?
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Catastrophe!
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
After yesterday's power outage, I left it until today to pick up the remains of hydra. A good thing, too. It took all day and I still wasn't done.
In principle it came back relatively quickly. Fire up my kludge window managers, start firefox... Nothing. Well, for a while. Then the machine rebooted.
Huh? That never happens. Try again. Start X. Start window managers. Start firefox. Spontaneous reboot!
Damn, what's causing that? Something wrong in /usr/local? Ran a manual fsck on the root file system, and how about that, it found a number of anomalies. Start firefox. Crash.
OK, something in /usr/local? Simple, let's restore a new version of the root file system on /home and link /usr to it. Reboot. Start firefox. Crash.
OK, let's install a new firefox. Packages to delete:... That way madness lies.
OK, build from source. No fewer than 4 out-of-date packages. Finally they were updated, then...
===> Configuring for firefox-126.0_2,2
env: /home/src/FreeBSD/git/ports/www/firefox/work/firefox-126.0/configure: No such file or directory
make clean and restart.
=> firefox-126.0.source.tar.xz doesn't seem to exist in /home/src/FreeBSD/git/ports/distfiles/.
=> Attempting to fetch https://download.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/firefox/releases/126.0/source/firefox-126.0.source.tar.xz
It hadn't even downloaded the sources!
After that, all went well. Install the new version, start... Reboot!
Spent a bit of time thinking about that, and whether I shouldn't use Google Chrome instead. Tried that, with less than stellar results. If I make the switch (and God knows I have no great love of firefox), it'll have to be some other time.
So what is it? Hardware? Maybe the display card? Tried starting it to run on eureka. Reboot!
But this time it was different. I had started from the console, and it showed that it paniced and printed a stack trace just long enough (about 1 to 2 seconds) to be recognizable as such. OK, try again with a camera at hand:
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As I had suspected by this time, it was a corrupt file system. But I had already run fsck multiple times, and it didn't find anything. The inode number 294790917 made it clear that it was on the /home file system: the root file system only has about 5.5 million inodes. Nothing for it: dump an image of the entire file system for later analysis, and then rebuild the file system. Dig out an old external USB drive and run a dd through gzip.
Bad idea. gzip only uses one CPU, leaving 31 idle. Copying the 3.8 TB took 16 hours! Nothing more to be done today. All day long, and hydra was still not usable. A good thing that I had eureka, and a good reason to stick with the two system configuration. But when will it be over?
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USA will protect Ukraine
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
Seen in the Kyiv Independent:
Blinken emphasizes long-term US security commitment to Ukraine in visit to Kyiv. "If Russia or anyone else were to attack Ukraine, we will work with Ukraine immediately at the highest levels to coordinate how to help you beat back the threat," U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said.
A good thing that the Russians have no intention of invading Ukraine.
| Thursday, 16 May 2024 | Dereel | |
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Recovering hydra, day 2
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Copying the /home file system on hydra ran until 4:28 this morning. The next step would be to copy the individual files—maybe. After all, they were all backed up—maybe. This morning's backup output failed:
*** Mail of at least 153911296 bytes could not be accepted
*** at hydra.lemis.com due to lack of disk space for temp file.
*** Currently, 150424 kilobytes are available for mail temp files
Admire the different units, almost obscuring the fact that the message was only just too big. I wonder what it contained.
But in the meantime it occurred to me: I had run a full fsck on the root file system, but I had only run the journal fsck on /home. I have an up-to-date copy of the file system on my backup disk, so why not run a full fsck on /home? Even with a fast SSD it took a while, and I saved the output. That was worthwhile:
* Phase 1 - Check Blocks and Sizes
INCORRECT BLOCK COUNT I=295272877 (13248 should be 8064)
CORRECT? yes
** Phase 2 - Check Pathnames
UPDATE FILESYSTEM TO TRACK DIRECTORY DEPTH? yes
DIRECTORY CORRUPTED I=294790917 OWNER=grog MODE=40700
SIZE=1024 MTIME=May 14 16:39 2024
DIR=/grog/.cache/mozilla/firefox/d8hf2bvx.firefox/cache2
UNEXPECTED SOFT UPDATE INCONSISTENCY
SALVAGE? yes
That was the only inconsistency, and clearly it's the cause of the problems: the inode number was the same as in the panic message, and since it's in the firefox hierarchy it explains the relationship. So I'm relatively confident that there's nothing wrong with the file system now. And if there is, I have multiple backups.
Still, time to complete the migration from eureka. There are a number of issues: some configuration files in my home directory are dependent on the system, and I don't have a general solution for that. And things like this diary need to be where they can be accessed from the web server on eureka. In addition, the kludge RCS setup that I started over 20 years ago gets in the way; time to unravel it. And finally, of course, I really need to fix my window manager configuration.
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Plotting my weight
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
I have a doctor's appointment tomorrow, and I wanted to talk to him about the concerns about weight loss I had last month. Yes, I can take my notebook, but this sort of things works best with a graphical representation. Played around with Gnuplot, a program that really frustrates me, and after a lot of RTFM and comparison with the scripts I use for my weather pages, I was only able to come up with this graph:
Still, that should be sufficient. It shows relatively constant weight up to about 21 March, coincidentally (or maybe not?) the day of my first cataract operation, and then a steep descent followed by only a slight improvement.
| Friday, 17 May 2024 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 17 May 2024 |
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Huevos a la tigre revisited
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Somehow I've never been happy with my huevos a la tigre recipe (a falsified version of Huevos a la flamenca). In particular, the eggs still didn't come out correctly. Dammit, it should be something between an omelette and scrambled eggs. It can't be that difficult. Here's what I ended up with:
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Weight graph: take a step back
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Topic: technology, health, opinion | Link here |
Yesterday's graph of my weight was compelling, but somehow it's a little short. It started at the beginning of the year, but I've been recording my weight for over a year. How about some more data points? Spent a while typing in the values for the last 4 months of last year. And how about that, a completely different viewpoint. The first graph is the second half of the second graph:
Oh. That's not at all what I expected, and it clearly shows the advantage of plotting graphs. So it looks as if there's not that much wrong with me after all.
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Health checkup
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Topic: health | Link here |
Into town to see Paul Smith, my GP. Very little to say. My blood test results seem to be some of the best I've had, though the indications of macrocytosis remain. I won my bet about the MCV value: 103 fl. I had bet 104, Paul 101. About the only new thing, apart from still more forms from Medicare to sign, was my waist measurement. He says that 94 cm is the maximum, and I'm 98 cm. I don't see that getting any better, and Paul doesn't seem overly concerned either.
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Danish Fetta
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Topic: food and drink, language, opinion | Link here |
On the way home stopped in at ALDI and looked around for inspiration. One thing that we needed was feta, which Yvonne usually buys at Woolworths (why, I don't know). ALDI has some too—from Denmark!
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They had Greek “fetta” there too, and just for the fun I took one of each. It'll be interesting to compare them.
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More hydra net hangs
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Topic: technology, photography, opinion | Link here |
Last month I had issues with hydra hanging while processing photos with despise, a Microsoft VM. I suspected a network card issue at the time, and I stopped using despise for a while. But then I tried again, and so far there were no issues. Then today I reprocessed some old photos, a total of 159 images from ten years ago. And in the middle of running “Perfectly Clear“, I got another dreaded net hang.
Or was it? I had prepared for this eventuality with a vty logged in as root and with only local file systems in its path. Switched to it. No keyboard input! Switched to another vty. All was well. Back to my prepared vty. Keyboard works. ping eureka? Unknown host. ping 192.109.197.137? Works fine. ping eureka? Works fine. I had had a ping running in the opposite direction on eureka, and it showed:
64 bytes from 192.109.197.129: icmp_seq=10 ttl=64 time=0.132 ms
64 bytes from 192.109.197.129: icmp_seq=22 ttl=64 time=7438.541 ms
64 bytes from 192.109.197.129: icmp_seq=23 ttl=64 time=6437.613 ms
64 bytes from 192.109.197.129: icmp_seq=24 ttl=64 time=5435.655 ms
64 bytes from 192.109.197.129: icmp_seq=25 ttl=64 time=4417.687 ms
64 bytes from 192.109.197.129: icmp_seq=30 ttl=64 time=0.134 ms
So yes, it's at least an issue with the network adapter, but something that I haven't seen before, and the keyboard issue is also a question. I had another hang later in the same batch, and recovery was similar. In each case it resulted in corrupted images, so it's not ideal. I wonder if the vendor's driver would do better.
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NFS fun
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Topic: technology | Link here |
I still have my home directory spread across hydra and eureka, and it's definitely not ideal. Today I wrote yesterday's diary entry on hydra and committed it. It didn't show on the same file system on eureka. I've experienced consistency issues with NFS in the past, but it's been a while, and I've been doing things like this for a long time. What has changed now?
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Mona come home
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Seen this evening:
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That's the cat basket that Yvonne bought in advance of Mona's arrival nearly a month ago. Up to now, neither cat had used it at all.
| Saturday, 18 May 2024 | Dereel | Images for 18 May 2024 |
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Yvonne sick
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Topic: health, general, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne went to feed the horses in the morning, as usual. When she got back, she told me that she had a cold and retired to her bed for the rest of the day, not eating anything.
How serious is it? Not very, she says. But for me it's a concern, of course. And somehow the whole day changed.
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SMS takes over the world
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I didn't need to worry about forgetting yesterday's doctor's appointment: I got not one, but two SMS to remind me.
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Marginally acceptable, I suppose. What if I hadn't read the messages? Would they have called me? If so, that's really acceptable: it saves a lot of work on both sides. But why not an email? Ah, email is portable, so it must be bad.
Then this morning I received more SMSs:
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I suppose that's acceptable, too, though really barely. Why can't they just send email? Even “smart” phones can handle that. That went through with this stupid identification via date of birth in a format of their choosing, and the assignment was complete. Download a copy? Sure. So it downloaded. Where is it? How do I know? The File Mangler doesn't seem to either. It doesn't even identify the file with which it has problems:
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But then there was another one:
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Now isn't that stupid? What kind of URL is that? Did they really mean www.servicesaustralia.gov.au/myaccount/icu? No, it seems not. It's s[cp]am, in this case a particularly inept one, since the URL doesn't exist. But it does highlight how difficult it is to separate legitimate messages from malicious ones, especially if you can't see the metadata.
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Saving SMSs
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
I've been trying in vain for years to find an app that reliably forwards SMSs to email. This recent increase in their use by people who should know better just makes the thing more important.
I have a couple of apps installed on my phone in the vain hope that they might help, but most of them just want to back up, not forward. OK, if that's all there is, try SMS Backup & Restore. Google Drive? Dropbox? OneDrive? Or (strongly discouraged) on your phone?
Sigh. Somehow these people are not on the same planet as I. Select “this phone”,
ignore alarm bells, and I was actually able to select a directory folder that I could access externally, though of
course they changed the path name from /SMS to /primary/SMS. But yes, it
created a backup, and I was able to download it. Now what do I do with it? It looks like
this:
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8' standalone='yes' ?><b>^M></b>
<!--File Created By SMS Backup & Restore v10.20.002 on 18/05/2024 09:01:01--><b>^M></b>
<!--
To view this file in a more readable format, visit https://synctech.com.au/view-backup/
--><b>^M></b>
<smses count="588" backup_set="fc0345b6-7b21-47c2-9691-e5878d9dec93" backup_date="1715986857253" type="full"><b>^M></b>
...
<sms protocol="0" address="+61420810625" date="1715921300502" type="1" subject="null" body="Hi Gregory, following your recent bulk billed visit to Health First Medical Group please click on the link below to assign your Medicare benefits to Dr Paul Smith. automedsystems.com.au/online/mb/fwaGIoUic Your prompt attention would be appreciated. Thank ... view all automed.au/BC5280sr" toa="null" sc_toa="null" service_center="+61415013040" read="1" status="-1" locked="0" date_sent="1715921297000" sub_id="1" readable_date="17 May 2024 14:48:20" contact_name="Hf" /><b>^M></b>
I suppose it's par for the course that it's all XML. But even so there are some interesting things to note:
Look at those times. They look almost like time_t. But they're not—quite. Taking the backup date 1715986857253, it seems that it's time_t with 3 digits appended:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/44) ~/household/Health/Greg 22 -> date -r 1715986857
Sat 18 May 2024 09:00:57 AEST
What are the digits for?
It appears to be truncated. This could be at the source, of course.
The most important part is at the top:
To view this file in a more readable format, visit https://synctech.com.au/view-backup/
With that, I get all of the SMSs I have ever received, with dates in emetic US format. But at least they're readable:
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And of course it doesn't interpret the URLs, though it is possible to copy them.
So: some progress towards what should be basic functionality. I'm sure there are more surprises in store.
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More house photos
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Another round of house photos today, and once again the latest version of enblend made a mess of them. Time to install enblend 4.1.4 on hydra.
| Sunday, 19 May 2024 | Dereel | Images for 19 May 2024 |
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Yvonne still sick
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Topic: health | Link here |
Yvonne still hasn't more than started to recover from her cold, and she spent all day in bed. Only in the evening did she get up, ate a slice of bread, and watched TV. Hopefully things are looking up.
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SMS backup, the down side
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
After yesterday's success with saving SMS messages, I set up SMS Backup & Restore to back up at frequent intervals, once an hour. Today I downloaded the results. 20 files, each 20 MB in size, and all almost identical. Only the backup date was different.
Complete backups! It's bad enough to have a single file backup, but it seems that there is no provision for incremental backups. Clearly once an hour is far too frequent. For the moment I'll go back to once a day.
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Building enblend 4.1.4
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Topic: technology, photography, opinion | Link here |
I can't run the enblend 4.1.4 binaries directly on hydra due to library hell. Sometimes I wonder if dynamically linked executables are still a good idea. But I have the source: build it.
Use the port in the Ports Collection? That's too fragile. If it's not up to date, it won't work. So build it as the author intended. After tripping over the confusing installation instructions, I came to:
Extract the source archive, of course. I chose to do so in /usr/ports/graphics/enblend-4.1.4/work, giving the tree /usr/ports/graphics/enblend-4.1.4/work/enblend-enfuse-4.1.4.
Adapting the path name from the README file,
cd enblend-enfuse-4.1.4/
make --makefile=Makefile.scm
mkdir build
cd build
The next line in README is only for Apple, and it reads:
CPPFLAGS=-I/opt/local/include LDFLAGS=-L/opt/local/lib cmake ..
But of course I used simply cmake ... And it worked, though it produced lots of grumbling at the top that nobody would normally see.
Then simply make. That didn't go so well:
[ 7%] Building CXX object src/CMakeFiles/enblend.dir/error_message.cc.o
In file included from /usr/ports/graphics/enblend-4.1.4/work/enblend-enfuse-4.1.4/src/error_message.cc:29:
/usr/ports/graphics/enblend-4.1.4/work/enblend-enfuse-4.1.4/src/error_message.h:29:14: error: functions that differ only in their return type cannot be overloaded
extern char* strerror_r(int errnum, char* buf, size_t buflen);
~~~~~ ^
/usr/include/string.h:94:6: note: previous declaration is here
int strerror_r(int, char *, size_t);
~~~ ^
/usr/ports/graphics/enblend-4.1.4/work/enblend-enfuse-4.1.4/src/error_message.cc:58:11: error: cannot initialize a variable of type 'char *' with an rvalue of type 'int'
char* messageptr = strerror_r(anErrorNumber, &message[0], buffer_size);
^ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
2 errors generated.
Why? The error messages are valid, and they relate to incorrect types in the source file. But this used to compile. Is the compiler just getting more finicky?
And there I left it standing while I pondered how to fix the problem.
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tiwi problems?
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Topic: technology, multimedia | Link here |
While looking at a web page on tiwi in the afternoon, everything froze. Well, almost everything. The mouse cursor still ran, but I couldn't input anything. Off to hydra, which told me that the X server was running at 100%. Rogue web page? Quite possibly. Shot down firefox, and X went with it. Restart X, and things seemed to work, but though I had started it with -listen tcp, I wasn't able to start anything that would talk to tiwi:0, not even locally. Is that because I started X from a different system?
But while watching TV later, the system paniced:
May 19 18:55:22 tiwi kernel: Fatal trap 12: page fault while in kernel mode
May 19 18:55:22 tiwi kernel: cpuid = 3; apic id = 06
May 19 18:55:22 tiwi kernel: fault virtual address = 0x0
May 19 18:55:22 tiwi kernel: fault code = supervisor read data, page not present
May 19 18:55:22 tiwi kernel: instruction pointer = 0x20:0xffffffff828debf2
May 19 18:55:22 tiwi kernel: stack pointer = 0x28:0xfffffe0073550a90
May 19 18:55:22 tiwi kernel: frame pointer = 0x28:0xfffffe00b1ff8e10
May 19 18:55:22 tiwi kernel: code segment = base 0x0, limit 0xfffff, type 0x1b
May 19 18:55:22 tiwi kernel: = DPL 0, pres 1, long 1, def32 0, gran 1
May 19 18:55:22 tiwi kernel: processor eflags = interrupt enabled, resume, IOPL = 0
May 19 18:55:22 tiwi kernel: current process = 12 (swi4: clock (0))
What caused that? Normally the software interrupts are as solid as anything could be. Hardware issues? Looking further back, I saw:
May 19 16:39:21 tiwi kernel: NVRM: GPU at PCI:0000:01:00: GPU-85983119-e9ef-ac66-6817-fbed5657b871
May 19 16:39:21 tiwi kernel: NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:01:00): 31, Ch 00000005, engmask 00000101, intr 10000000
May 19 16:39:31 tiwi kernel: NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:01:00): 38, 0001 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
May 19 16:39:31 tiwi kernel: NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:01:00): 39, CCMDs 00000006 000090b5
May 19 16:42:09 tiwi kernel: NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:01:00): 31, Ch 00000001, engmask 00000101, intr 10000000
May 19 16:42:12 tiwi kernel: pid 1353 (Xorg), jid 0, uid 0: exited on signal 6
I've never understood these Nvidia messages. It looks as if that, and not a rogue web page, was the cause of the X crash.
The good news is that the system display came up on the TV, as I had hoped to achieve last week. Still, time for new hardware?
| Monday, 20 May 2024 | Dereel | Images for 20 May 2024 |
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Another ramen experiment
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
I still don't have a good recipe for Ramen noodles for breakfast. Earlier in the month I tried an AI-generated recipe that didn't really go as I expected. OK, try again, interpreting these emetic cups and spoons, and came up with:
| quantity | ingredient | step | ||
| 50 g | beef | 1 | ||
| 2 | shiitake mushrooms | 1 | ||
| 50 g | miso paste | 2 | ||
| 25 g | light soya sauce | 2 | ||
| 25 g | vinegar | 2 | ||
| 10 g | garlic paste | 2 | ||
| 5 g | ginger paste | 2 | ||
| 25 g | water | 2 | ||
| 5 g | sesame oil | 2 | ||
| 150 g | cooked ramen | 3 | ||
| 35 g | spring onions | 4 | ||
Cut the step 1 ingredients into serving pieces. Mix the step 2 ingredients and bring to boil in a pan. Add the step 1 ingredients and cook. Add the noodles, mix well and heat. Serve with chopped spring onion on top:
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How was it? Still too salty. I need to take a step back and think of alternatives.
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More VoIP issues?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne received a phone call this morning on her mobile phone. Why that? The caller told me that she had tried the (VoIP) “landline”, but that it wasn't available.
It works for me. But somehow this sounds like a compatibility issue. Do I have the courage to call Aussie Broadband and report it?
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Yvonne's progress
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Topic: health | Link here |
Yvonne is still feeling anything but well, though there are indications that she's getting over whatever it was. It wasn't COVID-19, anyway: we have a dead RAT to prove it.
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Failed cat photos
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Topic: animals, photography, opinion | Link here |
Found Bruno and Mona together today. That needs a photo! Got my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark I, put an appropriate lens on it, and tried to take a photo. Couldn't focus! Tried various things, during which the camera made strange noises, similar to but different from the noise that the image stabilizer makes when composing a photo. Then the display went blank.
Tried again with a different lens. Similar problems, though the noise no longer occurred. This time an indicator S-IS.AUTO at top left blinked red. Then it went blank again.
And it stayed that way. Spent some time investigating. Almost certainly something has failed, probably (based on the display and the strange noises) something to do with the IBIS. Should I get it repaired? It's well over 10 years old, and I can get a replacement for $400. The last repair that Olympus did for me cost $431.63, and there's no reason to assume that this would be any simpler. So a replacement it is.
But what? The E-M1 on offer is clearly one possibility, but it would also be close to 10 years old. How about the latest and greatest, the OM System OM-1 Mark II? A quick check showed that the cheapest body I could get would set me back about $3,300. Yes, I could afford it—it's been over 7 years since I last bought a new body for myself. But what can it do for me that the E-M1 can't? Spent some time comparing things, and found only that the sensor technology is better (allowing boosted sensitivities of up to 51°/100,000 ISO), better IBIS, potentially better autofocus (including animal eye recognition). Is it worth it? I still need to agonize.
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Paul Callow
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Topic: history, opinion | Link here |
Mail from Rosemary Bunnage today. I had never heard of her, but she's the cousin of my schoolfriend Paul Callow. She included a photo of him with her and his father, along with Mark.
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From the indication at bottom right, that photo was taken some time in the 1990s, on an 8 August. Rose says that it was taken “before he became ill”, something that I must follow up on.
But that's the second reference to Paul today. While walking the dogs I saw the first Amanita muscaria of the season. I've known that name from over 60 years ago, from when our group of unsporty intellectual misfits (Peter Green, Paul Callow, Rees of unknown Christian name) were talking about St. John the Divine (now apparently identified as John of Patmos), the author of the Book of Revelation. The general opinion was that he saw visions as the result of consuming Amanita muscaria. It was only decades later that I identified it as the common toadstool:
But somehow Paul was special. I knew him throughout our time at school, and in fact his father was partially responsible for our choice of school. It was pure coincidence that we became relatively close: I had almost nothing to do with his twin brother Nigel. Looking back it seems that we continued to do things together throughout my time at school. Here we are skiving games (something that we both hated) by working in the “Pioneers”, where we did some very lazy and inefficient building work:
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And then there's this picture of the whole Pioneers group, with teacher “Drax” Baker at the left. He too had strong connections to Malaya. Paul and I are both wearing boaters (straw hats). I wonder if there was some kind of agreement.
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I wonder what happened to him.
It seems that Rose lives in Port Fairy, while her children live in Ballan. How do you get from one place to another? A good choice is through Dereel. Maybe we'll see her some time.
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Still more weather station pain
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
After yesterday's crash on tiwi, I forgot to restart the weather application. When I did, I once again ran into this issue with the MySQL libraries. I really need to RTFM about that.
But it only ran for about 20 minutes. Then it hung again with the eternal
May 20 15:46:31 tiwi wh1080[26226]: Can't read device: Input/output error or Unknown error (5)
May 20 15:46:32 tiwi wh1080[26227]: Can't read device: Device busy or Unknown error (16)
How I hate this thing! USB connection problems? Tried the usual workarounds, to no avail. Then I disconnected the extension cable and moved the device closer to tiwi with just a normal cable. Works! So it was all just an issue with too-long cables!
Well, no. That ran for about 30 minutes and hung again. Looked more careful at the output:
=== root@tiwi (/dev/pts/12) /home/grog/src/weather/WH-1080-teevee 20 -> ./wh1080 $STATION grog "" eureka
./wh1080 starting
Raw rain: 0.000000, max: 3.000000
temprain before: 7245
Rain prev: 7245, now: 7245, raw 7245.0, temprain 7245
Can't read device: Unknown error or Device busy (16)
Why did it stop then? That was in the middle of retrieving the information. More investigation shows that there were—once again—multiple copies of the binaries running. That's my fault, not the station's. But how do I work around it? I start daemons that run no matter what. Time to find a way to kill existing ones when I start a new one:
ps waux | grep dorun | awk '{print "kill " $2}' | sh
For reference, usbconfig tells me:
ugen1.3: <vendor 0x1941 product 0x8021> at usbus1, cfg=0 md=HOST spd=LOW (1.5Mbps) pwr=ON (100mA)
ugen1.3.0: uhid0: <vendor 0x1941 product 0x8021, class 0/0, rev 1.10/1.00, addr 3>
| Tuesday, 21 May 2024 | Dereel | Images for 21 May 2024 |
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Garden flowers in late autumn
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
It's a month before the June solstice, time for the monthly garden photos.
There's not very much going on at this time of year. Spring bulbs are already on their way:
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That includes a couple from Jane Ashhurst, notably this one, which I thought had died:
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Is the Camellia japonica recovering? It still looks sick, but there are some buds on the way, and some of the leaves finally look green:
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For the time of year, the Corymbia ficifolia looks better than it has done:
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And the Abutilons also look good, though they're not flowering as profusely as I had hoped:
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And the Banksia serrata is flowering happily:
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My previous concerns were probably a misunderstanding of when it flowers.
And the Hibiscus rosa-sinensis “Uncle Max” seems almost normal again, after a couple of years of looking sick:
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And the roses are still in bloom, as they seem to be almost year-round:
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More E-M1 investigations
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
How dead is my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark I? It displays nothing when I power it on. But will it talk to a computer? Yes! And when I disconnect it, I again briefly get this S-IS.AUTO at top left of the display before it turns off, so I can at least confirm what it says.
But the software (Olympus Workspace) didn't want to connect to the Internet. Why not? “Failed to communicate with the server". All this software is so terminally broken. It's not clear that it would have helped, so I let it be.
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Samba scratched?
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Topic: photography, animals, opinion | Link here |
Feeding the horses this evening, saw this on Samba's back:
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One of the few uses of a mobile phone. But it wasn't easy. The first image looked like this:
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Why the flare? Yes, there's the sky in the background, but barely. It seems that the real issue is what I always expected: without a lens cap, phone lenses get smeared. And the composition always seems to be bad, though I went to some trouble.
And the bare patch? I thought she might have scraped it, but Yvonne thinks that it's some insect, and she's treating it.
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Bruno trapped
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Topic: animals | Link here |
In the evening, heard a plaintive meow, repeated. Off to find this:
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That's the pantry, of course. I had to look carefully to see this (yes, it's cropped from the same photo):
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He couldn't find a way out. Fortunately he didn't just knock everything onto the ground, so I had to help him out:
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| Wednesday, 22 May 2024 | Dereel | Images for 22 May 2024 |
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Greg sick?
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Topic: health | Link here |
Yvonne's cold hasn't passed me by completely. I have a bit of a sore throat. Which was is it going to go? Better, worse, or unchanged? So far it's unchanged.
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OM System Workspace
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Topic: technology, photography, opinion | Link here |
Why didn't Olympus Workspace not want to connect to the “server” yesterday? It's too polite to say more than “Failed to communicate with the server". Which server? What failure? Checked and found that it was trying to contact https://app.olympus-imaging.com/olympusworkspace/en/, and that's an old, worn-out magic word. Now it needs to be called OM Workspace, and they're too polite to assume that you don't know that.
OK, try to download that. No, it claims not to know about Olympus Workspace, but it refuses to install while Olympus Workspace is present. OK, let's remove it. “Configuring Olympus Workspace 1.4.1”. Huh? I don't want to configure it, I want to remove it. And after 10 minutes with no progress, it became clear that it, too, was trying to contact the dead server.
Or so I thought. The program app was still running. Stop it, and the removal
went through. Probably obvious to a Microsoft user, but it confused the hell out of me.
So, install OM Workspace, which still wanted a camera serial number. Not a problem: all the sample images on the DPReview web site include metadata, so I could have used one of those. But it was easier to copy my own metadata. And yes, all worked, sort of. Though I had just downloaded the program from their web site, it was out of date! First I needed to update it to the latest and greatest.
And what can I do with it? Not much. But at least I can use it to update firmware. I wondered if it can update my Olympus E-1 DSLR, but of course it couldn't. I wonder if it can even recognize the serial number, which is only 5 digits long.
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Why buy an OM System OM-1 Mark II?
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
So should I replace the dead Olympus OM-D E-M1 or buy a new OM System OM-1 Mark II, a camera so new that not even its maker has been able to create a usable web page about it? Downloaded a few YouTube videos, a couple of which gave some insight. It seems that the built-in neutral density filter is quite flexible, and it may even be useful: it's graded, and the position and angle can be changed. That would address a number of the issues that I had fifteen years ago. But my guess is that it only applies to JPEG images. And then there's a 14 bit pixel mode, though what I've seen so far doesn't make it clear whether that applies generally or only to high-resolution images. And one of the videos claim that it can be used as a web cam “out of the box”, whatever that might mean.
But there's so much more that seems important. The sensor is faster, which allows for even faster stills, up to 120 per second with the electronic shutter. What does that say about flash synchronization? The E-M1 Mark 1 could only manage 1/13 s, while the E-M1 Mark II can manage 1/60 s. That's not even documented!
But one thing that is clear: the image quality is better, and it's reflected in the highest sensitivities. All cameras have a maximum ISO setting of 25,000/45°, which they insist on calling 25,600, but the OM-1 Mark II has an extended setting of up to 100,000/51° (102,480, of course). Downloaded some sample images, and I'll play round with them.
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Understanding the hydra net hang
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Topic: technology | Link here |
More photo processing with despise running on hydra, and more hangs. They're becoming predictable: feed more than about 50 images to “Perfectly Clear” and it will hang. And maybe it will recover by itself after a while (10 seconds? 50 seconds?). But in the process it stores truncated images. A repeat fixes that, but it's still irritating.
| Thursday, 23 May 2024 | Dereel | |
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Life with infections
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Topic: health | Link here |
It's clear that Yvonne did manage to infect me with her cold (or whatever it was): I have a sore throat, and I was feeling considerably under the weather, to the point that I had to turn up the heating and put on a second jumper. I wasn't feeling overly bad, but it's (almost) a new experience for me.
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More OM-1 Mark II investigations
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Spent more time looking at videos about the OM System OM-1 Mark II. Yes, it has interesting features. Autofocus is better but still not good, they say. And I don't really need a graduated neutral density filter: I have one already, and I don't use it. The image quality is better than the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II, but not by much: it's worse at 6400/39° ISO than the E-M1 Mark II is at 3200/36° ISO, so it doesn't really buy me much. And the cheapest (discounted) price I can find with Australian warranty is $3,350 (USD 2,217). That's over 8 times what the seller of the Olympus OM-D E-M1 is asking. In addition, the OM-1 Mark II is relatively new in the market; it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that the prices will drop by more than the price asked for the E-M1. So I think I'll go for the E-M1.
| Friday, 24 May 2024 | Dereel | |
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On the mend
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Topic: health | Link here |
Whatever infection I got yesterday isn't gone yet, but it's going, though Yvonne and Petra both didn't seem convinced: I was quite hoarse most of the day. But I feel almost normal, and it won't be long now. Only Yvonne is still feeling not back to normal, after nearly a week.
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OM-1 Mark II documentation
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
I may have bought an Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark I, but that doesn't mean that I've stopped looking at the OM System OM-1 Mark II. Today I fought my way through the manual looking for answers to questions I still had.
At least the manual looks big enough now. Ten years ago I complained about the manual for the E-M1, only 165 pages. This one has 566 pages, and it does seem to contain more information, if you can only find it.
First question: is the 14 bit pixel mode generally applicable, or only for Hi-Res shots? It seems that it's only for Hi-Res. Why? Is that some indication of the capabilities of the sensor?
And flash sync speed with electronic shuter? That's more complicated than I thought:
The flash sync speed for silent modes (P.198), High Res Shot (P.239), and focus bracketing (P.278) is 1/100 s. Furthermore, combining [ISO] values over ISO 16000 with settings that use an electronic shutter (for example, silent mode or focus bracket shooting) sets the flash sync speed to 1/50 s. The flash sync speed is also set to 1/50 s during ISO bracketing (P.275).
It's nice to see it documented, but the 1/100 s is not significantly better than the 1/60 s that I get with the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II.
One thing that is interesting is another thing that I complained about 10 years ago: Wi-Fi connection only to a mobile phone and with the camera as access point. Now there's a program called OM Capture, and though the manual is too polite to tell you how to get it, it claims to be able to transfer
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A new camera?
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Topic: history, photography, opinion | Link here |
So my new camera will be my old camera, an Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark I. It's also the first camera that I bought on Facebook, and despite my concerns everything went smoothly, and within a couple of hours I had Australia Post's confirmation that it had been received and will be here on Monday or Tuesday. Do I believe that claim?
Of course, I did more thinking. The camera cost me $350 including postage. The cheapest list price I could find for the OM System OM-1 Mark II is $3,499, almost exactly 10 times that price. Is that what drove my choice?
Well, partially, as I suggested yesterday. If the price of the OM-1/2 drops by only 10%, I can have both cameras for the same price. But the real reason is that I don't see the advantage of the OM-1. To my surprise, even the seller of the E-M1 agreed, after I had paid for his camera: “For handling em1 is actually better. I use om1 only for birding... It's difficult to hold om1”. That could be a personal opinion, but it's interesting nevertheless.
Stepping back, it's becoming clear that digital camera technology has become mature. The first usable (in my view) digital camera was the Casio QV-5000 SX that I bought in June 1998: it had a 1.2 MP image format (or 1.3 MP, as they claimed against all evidence), the smallest that I considered acceptable. That's 26 years ago. During about the first 13 of those years, resolution was a key concern, and it increased to about 12 MP, probably really enough for anybody.
By then, other factors were taking over: the viewfinder, for example. While searching for historical documents, came up with SLR's — the end of an era? by Andrzej Wrotniak, who always seems to have something interesting to say. The article was written in 2005, at a time when SLR viewfinders were virtually unchanged since the Contax S of 1949. He saw that electronic viewfinders would take over (and regretted it, something that I never did). And that was really just before Olympus introduced the E-330, which had a limited form of live viewfinder. And in 2008 Panasonic introduced the Lumix DMC-G1, the first real modern electronic viewfinder camera. That's only 10 years into my 26 year period.
What has changed since then? It took another 5 years for the E-M1 to appear, and it seems to be the first EVIL (Electronic Viewfinder, Interchangeable Lens) camera to support phase detect autofocus, definitely an improvement. That's still only 15 years into my 26 years. And while there's no doubt that the OM-1 Mark II (introduced over 10 years later in 2024) is better, is it that much better? The technology is mature, and it seems that most improvements are related to in-camera processing functions, including autofocus. So I don't really expect any breakthroughs in the next few years.
| Saturday, 25 May 2024 | Dereel | Images for 25 May 2024 |
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Health?
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Topic: health | Link here |
Whatever infection I had is as good as gone, but there's still a frog in my throat—something that I have had for decades. Only currently it's still worse. That, too, will pass.
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Cat fun
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Topic: animals, photography, opinion | Link here |
Bruno has been escaping to the outside relatively frequently lately, about 2 or 3 times this week. Generally I've found him skulking round the Buddleja x weyeriana on the south side of the house. Today he tried again while I was trying to get my tripod through the too-narrow front door. The result:
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At least he didn't get out.
| Sunday, 26 May 2024 | Dereel | Images for 26 May 2024 |
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Beijing “Fried Sauce” Noodles, 炸酱面
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Finally got round to cooking the Beijing “Fried Sauce” Noodles (炸酱面), interpreting the recipe from The Woks of Life.
| quantity | ingredient | step | ||
| 80 g | skin-on pork belly | 1 | ||
| 5 ml | water | 2 | ||
| 10 g | lard | 3 | ||
| 15 g | spring onions | 4 | ||
| 5 g | ginger paste | 4 | ||
| 1 g | star anise | 4 | ||
| 0.2 g (1) | bay leaf | 4 | ||
| 0.6 g | cinnamon stick | 4 | ||
| 1.2 g | Sichuan peppercorns | 4 | ||
| 5 g | lard | 5 | ||
| 10 ml | Shaoxing wine | 6 | ||
| 5 ml | dark soya sauce | 6 | ||
| 15 g | sweet bean sauce tianmianjiang – 甜面酱 | 6 | ||
| 10 g | ground bean sauce | 6 | ||
| 30 ml | water | 6 | ||
| 200 g | cooked Shanxi planed noodles | 7 | ||
| 50 g | julienned carrot | 7 | ||
| 50 g | julienned cucumber | 7 | ||
| 10 g | garlic paste | 7 | ||
Make a lengthwise cut to separate the layer of pork fat and skin from the leaner meat in the belly. Keep them separate, cut both the fat (with the skin) and the meat into 1 cm pieces.
If the meat is fresh, mix the lean pork with small quantities of water until water is absorbed into the meat, and there is no visible standing liquid. Set aside.
Melt the lard and fry the skin gently. Cover the pot: it will spit a lot. Heat under gentle flame until the skin pieces are crisp, about 20 minutes:
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Remove the crisp skin from the pot.
Grind star anise, bay leaf, cinnamon and pepper in a grinder:
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Add the green parts of the spring onion, ginger, ground mixture to the pot. Reserve the white parts of the spring onion. Fry over low heat until warm:
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Add the additional fat and the lean pork. Cook for 1 minute, until the pork pieces turn white and opaque.
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Reduce the heat to low, and add the Shaoxing wine, dark soya sauce, sweet bean sauce, ground bean sauce, water, and the white parts of the spring onions. Mix well, cover and increase the heat to medium. Simmer for 10 minutes.
Put noodles in a bowl, mix with enough sauce to thinly and evenly coat the noodles—add it gradually until it’s the ideal level of saltiness for you. Top with the julienned carrots, cucumbers, and minced garlic.
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How was it? “Interesting”. It shows room for improvement, notably in the quantities. Most of my breakfast noodles have round 180 g of other ingredients (apart from the pork, KL Hokkien mee has 60 g of prawns, 60 g of squid and 60 g of choi sam, for example. How do I adapt the quantities? I suspect I need more research.
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More fun with Shanxi planed noodles
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
To the Beijing noodles I cooked the Shanxi planed noodles that I used years ago. Following the experience then, I rinsed and untangled them before cooking. That was relatively easy:
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Last time I had guessed that 4 minutes cooking time would be appropriate, and that's what I did today. I think I could reduce it further. Three minutes? Two? I should be cautious and stick with 3.
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Fill-in flash in the lounge room
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Topic: photography, animals, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne has filled in the curry tree pot with gravel to stop the cats (notably Bruno at this point) from using it as a toilet. He is not amused:
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But that's very difficult lighting. Sunlight and shadow. I can greatly improve it in postprocessing, but the issues remain:
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How about fill-in flash from the studio flash units that are really intended for the kitchen? Yes!
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| Monday, 27 May 2024 | Dereel → Napoleons → Dereel | Images for 27 May 2024 |
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Bubble and squeak?
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
Yesterday we had a particularly uninteresting dinner with something that we had labeled as Kassler. Some was left over, enough to make an improvised breakfast:
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It didn't taste good. But it reminded me of something we ate when I was a lad, which we called Bubble and squeak. It seems that we abused the term.
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A new camera
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
My “new” Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark I has arrived, already! That's amazingly fast: it was only posted on the evening of the previous working day.
Should I go and pick it up? I'll be in town tomorrow anyway, and I'll be going straight past the post office. But, surprisingly, I had been missing the old one, and of course I went to pick it up, and it turned out that that was the right thing to do.
First impressions: yes, an E-M1, looks much newer than mine, and it has only 9654 shutter actuations.
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But the serial number (MCS below) shows that it was built in November 2013, the same month as mine.
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That's particularly surprising because it “feels” different: the OK button in the middle of the arrow pad is indented further than on my other cameras. It's also interesting that all these cameras supply the MCS value as “Internal Serial Number". The camera that I used to take these photos (Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II) reports its age as December 2016, which looks absolutely plausible.
It took me all afternoon to set it up. I was half expecting that, and I already have a (somewhat out-of-date) list of settings to go through. But it's a mess, and I need to completely rework it. In the process I dragged out a lot of other cameras for comparison:
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The list did help up to a point, but I hadn't included all parameters. In particular, how do you turn off this irritating display of the last image after you take a photo? By default it displays for ½ second. I've turned it off in all my cameras, but I forgot how, and I forgot to write it down. It took me 20 minutes of traipsing through the menus and RTFM, not helped by the terminology they use. It's called “Rec View”, and it's located in the spanner menu. That certainly shows the advantage of keeping a list of what to set. And while I was at it, I discovered that it's possible to disable auto-ISO in manual mode, which would save me from mistakes with flash.
Other surprises were that the viewfinder focus adjustment (what people call “diopter”), which was set to a really negative value (-2 dioptre? It seems that it was even worse). Still, that means that the viewfinder can't have been burnt, which has happened to me: if the setting is the maximum, +2 dioptres, sunlight can burn it.
And other things? My old camera couldn't trigger flash for some reason. Can this one? Yes:
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It's not surprising that it's so dark: it was taken with the toy FL-LM2 flash that comes with the camera, and it doesn't have the guide number to handle the distance at the f/8 that I chose. But I continued, this time with a real flash (the mecablitz 58 AF-II). And there was another surprise:
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What went wrong there? It looks as if the flash wasn't set for the correct focal length. Is that the fault of the camera or the flash? Do I want to know? At longer focal lengths it worked fine:
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I should test it with the flash triggers and the old Meike flash unit, which no longer works even on the E-M1 Mark II.
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Samba eaten of worms?
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Last week I noted this on Samba's neck:
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It hasn't gone away. Yvonne decided that it was a fungal infection and tried to treat it with Carbaryl, not for the faint-hearted, then smeared some paste on it:
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Later people on Facebook suggested that it could be due to neck threadworms, whatever that might be (a number of different parasites are possible), leaving her quite upset. One person she didn't ask was Pene Kirk.
| Tuesday, 28 May 2024 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 28 May 2024 |
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Tak On noodles again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
It's been three years since I last ate these “Tak On” Singapore Chow Mein noodles:
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I've had trouble with them going mouldy on me in the last, so this time I cooked them all at once, in the process discovering significant differences from last time. They only increase by 1.44×. And I ate them with mi udang, for which they proved to be singularly unsuited. I think these are better for fried dishes.
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More SMS backup pain
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I've managed to stop from backing up the same data every day, but now I've reached the opposite result:
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What went wrong there? Followed the Help link and found page after page of details for phones that I didn't have. So how about “BACK UP NOW”? Tried that:
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Why is this stuff all so horribly flaky?
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Optometrics again
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Topic: health | Link here |
Off to town to have my eyes tested, the first time since my cataract operation. The results were quite a surprise:
| Parameter | Left | Right | ||
| Spherical | +0.75 | +0.75 | ||
| Cylindrical | -0.75 | -1.00 | ||
| Axis | 120° | 95° |
That's not exactly the perfect vision that David Fabinyi had claimed. In particular, the attention to astigmatism for the left eye seems to have failed, and though I had been concerned about not have vision to infinity, I'm well beyond that. But Tamara, the optometrist, told me that they're fairly typical of what they see, and that the surgeons seldom see the final results. And yes, the lenses look good.
New glasses. The prices! $399 for the progressive lenses, $149 for the frame, $70 for coating. And then I need my computer glasses, and BUPA only refunds $225. Still, I'll have to accept it. Cheaper frames? The $39 and $149 range look indistinguishable to me. But no, the offer only goes with the $149 range.
So it was looking like a total of $500 or so. To my surprise, it was only $173.25: there were discounts on almost everything.
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X manuals: gone
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Topic: general, technology | Link here |
When we moved into the Stones Road house I threw away a large number of old books. But some were too good to throw away, like the original X manuals published by O'Reilly in the early 1990s. I offered them on the Unix Heritage Society mailing list and ended up promising them to Cornelius Keck. But there's no hurry, right?
Well, that was 9 years ago, and after about 5 I asked again. Yes, still interested. Another 4 years, and finally today I took them in for shipment. It's still much less than the 20 years that Terry McGee took to not repair my flutes.
| Wednesday, 29 May 2024 | Dereel | Images for 29 May 2024 |
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Mustard greens?
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
While at the Fruit Shack yesterday, I found some seconds of choi sam, something I had been looking for. They were slightly yellowed at the edges, but less than half price, so I took two.
Oh. Not choi sam, as I discovered when I unpacked them. The stems all have flowers:
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I think that they're mustard greens, but I'm not sure. They taste similar, anyway.
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E-M1 settings: too hard
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Spent some time today trying to write up my list of settings for Olympus Micro Four Thirds cameras. What a pain! Should I even bother? It's a complete mess, but am I ever going to need it again? If so, I can probably extract the bits that I need.
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Air compressor: dead?
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Paul Donaghy along today with two air compressors: mine, which I knocked over last month, and which didn't want to run. It still doesn't: they couldn't find out what's wrong with it. So he brought a second one to lend to me.
What now? Repair it? It seems that they're pretty cheap new, and it might be cheaper to buy a new one than have the old one repaired. I got this one for free from Ray Nottle decades ago, so there's no particular loss.
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A waste of wine
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Topic: food and drink, general | Link here |
Small accident in the evening. I knocked over a glass of wine:
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Who would think that a single glass would make such a mess? It wasn't even empty at the end.
| Thursday, 30 May 2024 | Dereel | Images for 30 May 2024 |
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Bruno and Mona spend the night together
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Topic: animals | Link here |
We've finally dared to leave Bruno out in the lounge room with Mona overnight. Fireworks? No, I got up at 3:00 and found them lying together in Yvonne's armchair, sadly not long enough for me to get a photo. Nevertheless, Bruno was clearly not happy with the new arrangement, and round 6:30 he ran around meowing plaintively for quite some time. Hopefully he'll get over that. You'd think that it would be better than being locked in a cage.
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Digital driver license!
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Message on hirse, my mobile phone, today: my digital driver license is available. Just follow the instructions.
Did that, painfully typing in the email address and password, refusing to sync to Google, saving to phone. Password incorrect! Tried again. Same thing. Tried a bit more, and it got so upset that it went into a never-ending loop of displaying the page, erasing it and starting again.
OK, I'll try later on a Real Computer. Oh. Message gone. Nothing in my backups. No email. It's as if it never happened. How do I reinstate it?
Why is everything so flaky nowadays? It seems particularly bad if any government department is involved.
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X configuration continued
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
It's been some time since I did any work on my X configuration for hydra. Apart from just plain laziness, there's the question of font size. Now that I can see better, the sizes I have chosen seem too big.
But where do I set it? I wrote it down somewhere, possibly as a link, but after considerable searching I couldn't find it. Time to start my own X configuration overview.
Another thing that irritates me is this clipboard/cutbuffer dichotomy. So many programs copy data to the clipboard, while xterm uses the cutbuffer. I've played with autocutsel, but it doesn't seem to do what it claims to. “keep the X clipboard and the cutbuffer in sync”. It copies the cutbuffer to the clipboard, but not the other way round.
More searching. At this page I discovered something startling: an xterm menu selection “Select to Clipboard”. Yes, it's there, and it works. But now I can't paste! And Emacs doesn't want to know; another thing that I need to follow up on.
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More phone smart
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Callum Gibson came up with an observation today: SMS Backup & Restore can make incremental backups. It's just hidden in a menu where normal people would intuitively find it.
Than mail from ALDImobile: the 3G network is closing down at the end of August, after which my phone may not work. Check by texting “3G” to 3948. The result:
Thanks for using our device checker. The info below is from 30 April 2024, for your Xiaomi M2010J19SG.
This phone wont [sic] connect to the Mobile Network after 31 August 2024. This means you wont be able to make any calls (including emergency 000) after 31 August 2024. Please upgrade to stay connected. If you have changed phones recently, please check again soon.
Oh. I've had this phone for less than 3 years, and already it's obsolete! The good news is that Yvonne's slightly newer phone isn't, but it looks like I'll have to find a replacement for mine.
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Air conditioner problems again?
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Topic: general | Link here |
Somehow the air conditioner isn't running as well as it should. This evening it barely heated—the air coming out of the vents was round 24°, when it should be closer to 32°. And I had already noted repeated de-icing cycles during the night, though it wasn't clear that that is a fault. But I wonder whether the fix that Tony Nesci did last September was sufficient.
| Friday, 31 May 2024 | Dereel | Images for 31 May 2024 |
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Air conditioner woes
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Topic: general | Link here |
There's no doubt about it: something is wrong with our air conditioner again. Overnight it stopped and displayed an error 30, which according to this chart means “trip lock”:
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What does that mean? After power cycling it came up with another display, E b. What does that mean? I've decided that it's their way of displaying error 6, which is even stranger: “High Discharge Temperature (Discharge Temp exceeded 138°C)”.
Huh? First of all, it's cold, and secondly that temperature seems to be so far beyond the temperatures that exist in air conditioners—I thought that the maximum was round 50°.
That was in the early morning, where the temperature dropped to 4.8°. In the course of the day things got better. But clearly it's time to annoy Tony Nesci again.
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Spring on its way
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Seen today:
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And autumn isn't (quite) over yet!
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Digital driver license: scam?
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Thinking about yesterday's experience with trying to register my digital driver license, it occurred to me: I already have it! My article on the subect last August was when I installed the app and noted that I could authenticate myself with a thumbprint. And later I tried to use it at the Napoleons post office, but they didn't accept it, probably correctly.
So what's all this about? Somebody trying to scam me? First, let's change the password from a Real Computer. How about “W4s I breached?”? No, not valid:
Please enter a valid password. A valid password has at least 8 characters, at least one uppercase letter, at least one lowercase letter, at least one special character (e.g. '&%$!"), and at least one number.Password criteria checklist
Must be a minimum of 8 characters in length Yes Must contain a lowercase character (a-z) Yes Must contain an uppercase character (A-Z) Yes Must contain a numeric character (0-9) Yes Must contain a special character (e.g. '&%$!") Yes
OK, people, what's the problem? My guess is that it's another of these stupid apps that won't accept spaces, though they don't say so. No wonder I have so many insulting passwords. Now I have one more.
And was I breached? No, it seems kosher. Last year was a trial in the Ballarat area, and now it's available state-wide. Another case of Hanlon's razor.
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Another mobile phone search
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
So I need to buy a new mobile phone in the next 3 months. What should it be? Xiaomi, definitely. Not because I like them—after all, it is a “smart” phone—but because I have come to terms with their particular wrinkles. And there are now 5 generations of newer phones, with prices between $375 and round $2000.
Which do I choose? Definitely nothing over $1000, almost certainly nothing over $500. What features? I recently discovered that my current phone either doesn't have a telephoto lens for its camera subsystem, or it's so well hidden that I couldn't find it. But do I care? I use real cameras.
What else? I don't want anything as glacially slow as the Xiaomi Redmi 9A that I bought for Yvonne 2½ years ago. But real high performance? 8 GB RAM, 256 GB of storage? My current one has 128 GB of storage, and the menus tell me I have used 40 GB of them. So probably the most important thing is just that it should work as a phone.
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More clipboard pain
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Yesterday I found various ways to bridge the gap between the cut buffer and the clipboard. But they all seem to have issues, and I spent quite some time today trying to understand how to do things correctly. The only thing that I established with any certainty was that things don't ever seem to work the way they're documented. Emacs documentation contradicts itself, but claims that the normal c-y should copy from the clipboard, when in fact it copies from the cut buffer, as it always has done.
Why is this so difficult?
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